Quotes Flashcards
key quotes from chapter 1?
“A palimpsest of unheard sound”
“There was old sex in the room and loneliness”
“We yearned for the future”
“We still had our bodies”
“We learned to whisper almost without sound”
“Alma. Janine. Dolores. Moira. June”
key quotes from chapter 2?
“They’ve removed anything you could tie a rope to”
“I try not to think too much”
“For ladies in reduced circumstances. For that is what we are now. The circumstances have been reduced; for those of us who still have circumstances”
“How I used to despise such talk. Now I long for it”
“I hunger to commit the act of touch”
key quotes from chapter 3?
“From a distance, it looks like peace”
“I once had a garden”
“I’m a reproach to her; and a necessity”
“They can hit us, there’s Scriptural precedent”
key quotes from chapter 4?
“Perhaps he is an eye”
“Think of yourselves as seeds”
“She is my spy, as I am hers”
“I’m ravenous for news, any kind of news; even if it is false news”
“Such moments are possibilities, tiny peepholes”
“My red shroud”
“I find I am not ashamed after all. I enjoy the power”
key quotes from chapter 5?
“Doubled, I walk the street”
“Freedom to and freedom from”
“We were a society dying, said Aunt Lydia, of too much choice”
“She’s a magic presence to us, an object of envy and desire, we covet her”
“We are fascinated, but also repelled. They seem undressed. It has taken so little time to change our minds, about things like this”
key quotes from chapter 6?
“The heads are zeros”
“These bodies hanging on the Wall are time travellers, anachronisms. They’ve come here from the past”
“What I feel towards them is blankness. What I feel is that I must not feel. What I feel is partly relief, because none of these men is Luke. Luke wasn’t a doctor. Isn’t”
key quotes from chapter 7?
“The night is mine, my own time”
“The difference between lie and lay. Lay is always so passive”
“I would like to believe this a story I am telling. I need to believe it. I must believe it”
“If it is a story I am telling, then I have control over the ending”
key quotes from chapter 9?
“My room then. There has to be some space, finally, that I claim as mine, even in this time”
“Nolite te bastardes carborundorum”
“What you don’t know won’t hurt you, was all she would say”
key quotes from chapter 8?
“It’s a beautiful Mayday”
“She’s like my own reflection in a mirror from which I am moving away”
“All flesh is weak”
“She has become speechless”
“Was he in my room? I called it mine”
key quotes from chapter 10?
The spectacles women used to make of themselves”
“We lived in the blank white spaces at the edge of the print”
“I ought to feel hatred for this man. I know I ought to feel it, but it isn’t what I feel”
“FAITH. It is the only thing they have given me to read”
key quotes from chapter 11?
“It intersects me.. he deals only with a torso”
“He said a forbidden word. Sterile”
“No such thing as a sterile man”
“He could… report me”
“Give me children or else I die”
key quotes from chapter 12?
“Blessed are the meek. She didn’t go on to say anything about inheriting the earth”
“I wait. I compose myself. My self is a thing I must now compose”
key quotes from chapter 13?
“These pictures [of nineteenth-century harems] were supposed to be erotic… they were paintings about suspended animation; about waiting, about objects not in use. These paintings about boredom. But maybe boredom is erotic, when women do it, for men”
“Behind my closed eyes thin white dancers flit gracefully among the trees, their legs fluttering like the wings of held birds”
“This is a loony bin, Moira said”
“Janine… gang-raped… whose fault…?”
“I’m running, with her, holding her hand”
key quotes from chapter 14?
“I don’t sit, but take my place, kneeling, near the chair with the footstool where Serena Joy will shortly enthrone herself”
“As if I’m a piece of furniture”
“Household: that is what we are. The Commander is the head of the household. The house is what he holds. To have and to hold, till death do us part”
“He’s so close that the tip of his boot is touching my foot”
“They only show us victories, never defeats”
“Who knows if any of it is true? It could be old clips, it could be faked”
key quotes from chapter 15?
“An incendiary device”
“Still, it must be hell, to be a man, like that. It must be just fine. It must be hell. It must be very silent.’
“Blessed are the meek. Blessed are the silent. I knew they made that up, I knew it was wrong, and they left things out too”
“For the eyes of the Lord run to and fro throughout the whole earth”
key quotes from chapter 16?
“The rings of her left hand cut into my fingers. It may or may not be revenge”
“Below the Commander is fucking. What he is fucking is the lower part of my body. I do not say making love, because it is not what he’s doing. Copulating too would be inaccurate”
“This is not recreation”
“An improvement on the previous one, who smelled”
“Which of us is it worse for, her or me?”
key quotes from chapter 17?
“I rub the butter over my face; work it into the skin of my hands”
“I want to be held and told my name”
“I want to steal something”
“We’re mirrors”
key quotes from chapter 18?
“But this is wrong, nobody dies from lack of sex. It’s lack of love we die from”
“One of the gravestones in the cemetery near the earliest church has an anchor on it and an hourglass and the words: In Hope”
